Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Continues where Romero usually ends..., December 21, 2005
I was out of the comic book reading hobby for several years, but I have to say that I was glad that i came back to reading comic books again. One of the first titles that hooked me this second time around was Kirkman's The Walking Dead for Image Comics. I have to say that its taken the current renaissance of zombie films and books and ran away with it.
Using the same slow, shambling zombies that Romero first made popular with Night of the Living Dead and its subsequent sequels, Kirkman continues the story where Romero usually ended his films. All those times people have wondered what happened to those who survived in zombie films need not imagine anymore. Kirkman has created a believable world where the dead have risen to feast on the living, but has concentrated more on the human dynamic of survival in the face of approaching extinction.
I won't say that the story arc collected in this first volume has little or no zombies seen, but they've taken on more as an apocalyptic prop. One can almost substitute some other type of doom in place of zombies and still get a similar effect (as was done in Brian K Vaughn's equally great series, Y: The Last Man). What Kirkman's done is show how humanity's last survivors are now constantly, desperately adapting to a familiar world through unfamiliar circumstances. Characters from the start make the sort of mistakes regular people would make when they don't know exactly everything that is happening around them. Instead of chiding these people as one reads their story, we sympathize and hope for their continued survival.
I am hopeful that the rest of the collected trades will be equal to and maybe surpass this first story-arc. Already kirkman's done more to realizing the universe Romero created than alot of the hack filmmakers who have taken Romero's idea and cannibalized it for their own profit. I consider The Walking Dead as a must-read for anyone looking to find something different from all the costumed superhero titles.
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78 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The South Rises again! So do the Dead..., February 15, 2005
Let's talk, for a second or two, about the coming Zombie Apocalypse, the subject of Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore's ambitious and brutally beautiful graphic novel series "The Walking Dead".
Let me break the bad news to ya, big guy. You're not going to survive it.
Everyone watches zombie flicks with the notion that they'll survive. They're going to be one of the shotgun-toting mall-rustling heroes when it dawns on everybody that the Army ain't showing up.
Well let's put it to you this way: the Zombie Apocalypse is coming, and you're not going to make it. You're going to go get your mail, or be carrying your groceries out of the supermarket, and that's when you're going to meet your first Zombie. You've got a billion things flying through your noggin, Champ: pick up the kids, college tuition, your crazy stock portfolio, war and rumors of war, bio-terrorism, the big presentation at the Office tomorrow.
The Zombie is very Zen. It clears its mind. It has one single, driving purpose: it wants to sink its yellow tusks into your flesh and sample a little human pad thai.
Isn't that the way it always is---these things, like summer guests, always occur when you're just not prepared?
That's the guts of "The Walking Dead". Writer Kirkman states out front that he's less interested in a straight-out horror story---zombies springing out of the darkened woods and chowing down on some filet-au-Bob---than he is in exploring the dark thickets of the human brain exposed to what Kirkman calls "Extreme Situations".
Exactly.
The story follows Kentucky police officer Rick Grimes, thrown into a coma after a routine traffic stop goes bad. Just like "28 Days Later" he wakes up in an empty hospital. He buzzes on the nurse call-button; nobody shows up to help him. Which is, as we will shortly find out, probably a good thing.
Why? Because the hospital---most of it, anyway---is a tomb. Dead. Silent. There's a corpse, supine, fallen between elevator doors, his guts exposed, partially devoured. But for that single dead man, Grimes finds, to his horror, the hospital is deserted.
Of course, there's the matter of the lunchroom, stuffed to the grills with the Living Dead.
You could call it "While you were Sleeping", but it's not romantic, and it certainly isn't a comedy. While Grimes was out cold, the World Ended. The Dead Walked, and ate, and infected. Civilization ground to a halt. His town is dead; his house, run down; his wife and son, missing. The neighbor's house claimed by squatters. Word is everyone has gone to Atlanta, where the military has cordoned off the city and is protecting civilians. Grimes, in search of his family, in search of answers, takes a police cruiser and heads South.
To be sure, in zombie flicks I always root for the flesh-eaters, and here, whatever Kirkman says, you're reading "The Walking Dead" to see zombies, not follow a soap opera. But happily, Rackerton invests enough details in these characters to make them compelling: each has an agenda, obsessions, private vices, prejudices.
In other words, real people.
It certainly doesn't hurt Kirkman's story to have an artist as fine as Tony Moore bringing his vision to life. The black & white panels, the shadings, the crispness of the art---all of it is gorgeous, helping to accentuate the horror, but also to highlight the brutal beauty of a world gone feral.
Life, say the Buddhists and Christians, is Suffering. Suffering shapes us, molds us, ennobles us or breaks us apart. This is what is at work in "The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye": you see the characters change, shift, mutate, evolve---into stronger creatures, true, and into weaker, viler, sneakier creatures as well.
But if this is a hard world, Tony Moore's artwork makes it a bleakly gorgeous one. Take a hard look at the scene around a campfire in a wintery wood, seconds before horror intrudes: the downy snow, the shaded woods of the thicket, the faces sunk in shadow, backlit by the fire.
Some scholar once said that the Living can never stand up to the Dead: they are too many, and their hungry, avid minds are not freighted with the conscience of the Living.
Kirkman and Moore have put that contention into question in their first auspicious volume of the "Walking Dead". Doubtless the Dead will Walk, and the Walking will die---but who will survive, and what will become of them?
I'm hungry for more.
JSG
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wow!, May 20, 2005
Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye (Image, 2004)
Days Gone Bye is the first installment of what Robert Kirkman promises will be an epic graphic novel. (As I write this, Days Gone Bye has been out for less than a year, and vol. 3 is due to come out any day now; Kirkman is really cranking away on this one.) While it opens with one of the most common scenes in modern zombie lit, Kirkman's stated intention is very different than much of what we've seen recently, and at least in the first installment, the practice goes hand in hand with the theory.
Rick Grimes is a Kentucky cop who gets himself shot at the opening of the story. He wakes up from a coma some time later to find a deserted hospital. Upon searching, he finds that the walking dead of the title have pretty much taken over the planet. Rick heads for Atlanta, seeking his wife and child, and meets up with a group of survivors. While zombies form the frame of the story, what's at the core of this book is the dynamics between the survivors; the zombies are just the spice to their meat.
This is exceptional stuff. If the series continues to be this good, I can easily see it taking a place beside Watchmen on my very, very short shelf of the graphic novels I liked so much I actually went out and bought copies. ****
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